The not-so-fantastic tales of a lonely Gallentean

Just a quick update, got to head out shortly so I’ll post something more conclusive later this evening hopefully.

A lot of things have changed since I last posted, I changed from a carebear/wormhole guardian to Ilfort the Great, Scourge of the Caldari (perhaps I exaggerate…). I decided to make the jump from New Hanseatic Holdings (I still keep in touch with these guys!) to Moira. Vanguard.

What that essentially means is that now I wander around low sec getting shot at! I’ve been low-sec-death-seeking for 2 months and 7 days now and had some awesome times, got my first solo kill (;D) and got lost in nullsec (how do you null-sec warriors even remember where you’re going? Seriously, the names all look like LOL-WUT to me)! My Killboard is still looking somewhat… Empty, but I’ve managed 18 kills for 3 losses in these past 2 months which seems decent enough for me.

In RL terms, school is no more. Exams over and now I have to wait til August to see if I get the results I need to get into University (100m ISK says I don’t). Clearly, that means I have all of summer to shun my friends and play video games, YES!

P.S. I’m a reader of Nashh Kadavr’s blog and through that this blog was brought to my attention… Shout out to Sassy B for being awesome! Megathron confuse D:

“Do you remember how we first met?” Vin leafed through the pages of the latest finance report for her current alliance.

“No, you drugged me.” I replied morosely, “I woke up minus one Vexor and without pants.”

She sighed, “I told you what happened to your pants… Remember that Amarrian?”

“I don’t care, I still blame you.” I glared out of the viewing port of my quarters, silently lamenting the loss of my favourite pants. “How did you even get that report anyway? You’re not a director.” I pointed towards Vin accusingly with my empty wine glass.

“This? Oh, please…” Vin laughed loudly and dropped the large document to the floor. “More wine!”

I laid my head carefully on the desk infront of me and wrapped my arms around it. “I think I’ve had enough. Things are starting to move when they’re not allowed to.”

“Nonsense!” the young Caldari woman crossed the room with near impossible speed and flung open the refrigerator in the corner of the room. “I wish you had nicer wine.”

I lifted my head off of the table and sighed. “It only ever gets drunk when you come here and try make me drunk to give you… Money. Because I’m drunk?”

“Wha…?” Vin spun around and looked at me in the same way you’d look at a well-meaning but pathetic puppy. “More wine!”

I averted my eyes as she bent over and fished a new bottle from the bottom shelf of the refrigerator unit. “Last time I was this drunk, I kept getting drunk until I lost my pants. You know?”

“I know, Dear.” Vin beamed at me as she poured me another glass of wine. “Just a bit more and then you stop being uptight and law abiding!”

“Blah.” I waved my arm in her direction, still facing the opposite wall to her. “You have a minion! What happened to Juniper?”

“Oh!” Vin grabbed my hand and pushed the freshly poured glass into my grasp. “She was such a lovely girl… Unfortunately there was a freak cloning accident and she is no longer with us.”

“Oh…” with considerable effort I turned my head and gazed into my glass of wine. “I’m sorry to hear that… What happened?”

Vin smiled gently and sat in the chair across the desk from me. “It’s okay.” She reached out and placed her hand on my shoulder, “Apparently someone tracked down and killed all of her clones.”

Happens to the best of us. Sorry for not posting recently, had a lot on with school work and had some university interviews. I currently have some chemistry coursework which needs finishing by the end of this week (and remains around 8% completed) and then I get a week off of school. 🙂

I have a few posts planned for the near future (hopefully I’ll get chance to type them up this week/weekend) and Vin, the infamous and brilliant thief who I mentioned in a Flash Fiction apparently read my blog and seems to have essentially roped me into writing her autobiography…

That means I will post a small prompt every Friday. The following Tuesday, I’ll update the post with links to your own stories on your own blogs or even the EVE forum (preferably submitted through the comments here). This might consist of a phrase, or an object, or a location, or something else. Use it as the core theme, the starting sentence, or anything else; you just have to include it somewhere in the story. And the story should be really short. Definitely under one thousand words, but even greater brevity has great value. If you can tell a cohesive story (character, plot, theme) in a bare few sentences, go for it.

So, I was sitting in my Nemesis, Adastreia, cloaked up 34KM away from our Wormhole link to high sec. I was technically on “guard duty” but I figured one of my crew members would bother me if anything went wrong. While I was idling I decided to try check out some of the various news streams or channels that unexplicably make it through the wormhole link (for the same reason contract listings do but market information doesn’t?) and I came across this article. After skimming through a couple of the points by the Capsuleer using a channel called K162space I decided it was prudent to reasses the positioning of my camera drones which had decided to align towards our system’s resident blackhole (which I swear is secretly some kind of intergalactic, ancient evil which is slowly draining the souls from my corporation’s employees – perhaps more on that later) and focused them on the wormhole.

It made me think though, about how I’d managed to avoid so much of the trouble that my corpmates hadn’t. At first I thought it was because I’m generally more a bit less blood thirsty than some of my friends, or perhaps I am just too damn paranoid. It certainly wasn’t because I’m secretly a very skillful pilot. Then it dawned on me, I’m just lucky.

With the apparently epiphany that the only reason I was still alive was because of luck (and perhaps the “demon of the blackhole” was getting to me a bit) I decided it was time to order myself some high-security-side rest. After collecting any of my off-duty crew members lurking around our Starbase I jumped (I say jumped, it was more like I ran as fast as possible) through the wormhole and headed towards Dodixie (I know, not the first system that comes to mind when the word “rest” is uttered).

As I sat in the Fed. Navy station in Dodixie and chatted with an old friend I became very aware that my hangar has far more mineral content that a non-miner should own. After a little consideration I decided that I should probably get rid of some of the raw materials before I caught whatever pathogen miners carry and that I could probably unload them on my corp’s “premiere” manufacturer and demand he build me things. So next time you hear from me, I should own a nice shiny Retribution class Assault Frigate! While I hear some complaints about how you can’t stick enough modules on them in the way of warp scrambling-ness or flying-fast-ness, it looks like the rack of pulse lasers and the fair tank makes up for it. Aslong as you force a friend to tackle any enemies you might run into.

For me it’s all about the escapism and the freedom. I just love pretending to fly spaceships. In real life I’m just a normal person. I’m 18 years old, 5’10” tall and perform fairly well at school. Nothing notable, just boring. Boring, boring, boring – Not enough interesting things to do. If I brought this up with some of my friends they’d go off on rants about how cool they are for getting wasted at the weekend or going out to gigs and how I should join them… And while I’ve attended gigs, alcohol doesn’t really attract me much. So while they’re out collecting injuries and STIs on a Friday night I sit and read (As I type this I’m taking a break from reading Hesiod’s Theogeny), watch a movie (with friends sometimes, I’m not *that* reclusive) or play EVE. I’m probably one of the examples of MMO gamers that many MMO gamers don’t really want the public to know about, I’m a total, complete nerd.

So for me getting the opportunity to just forget about everything and play internet spaceships for a few hours is really, really nice. I’m not some uber carebear, if you blow my ship up I will be annoyed but meh, I can get a new one. If you blow my car up in real life I imagine I’d form some kind of grudge against you. Unlike a lot of other EVE players I know, EVE was my first real MMO. I had played a game called Flyff (all I can say about this is LOL) but got bored of mindless grinding in a setting which wasn’t really that nice to look at. I’ve never played WoW or Starwars Galaxies or Warhammer/LoTR Online, so I imagine as far as MMOs went at the time I was fairly easy to please. I first started playing at the insistance of my Cousin (who to this day still bothers me through EVE and *STILL* owes me a month of game time that he promised me for signing up) and I basically thought I’d be climbing into a Keres and somehow stopping opponents from shooting my corp members. I really had no idea what I was doing. I lost my first ship, a Maulus to a NPC Sansha frigate in a DED1. As I played on a little I decided I wanted to specialise in drones, about half a year later I climbed into an Ishtar. Suddenly I decided I wanted to fly a Deimos, realised they were a bit… Crappy… Wanted to fly a Zealot, got one. Sacrilege, check. Arazu, check. Pilgrim, check. I can basically do whatever the hell I want, in Flyff if I wanted to swap between tank and casting spells it generally meant biomassing a character and starting afresh. In EVE, providing I have the patience to skilltrain, I can fly whatever, whenever.

I’ve read quite a few people say that EVE has no “grind”, I disagree. Every time I wait the best part of a month for a skill, I die a little bit on the inside. Atleast in Flyff you had newbs who were easily impressed by your large axe and glowy, heavy armour. If I fly my Ishtar into a newb system and sit on a gate I imagine nothing would happen… But I’d say it’s this special type of grind that makes it all the more fulfilling. You can’t get powerlevelled in EVE, to fly that nice shiny ship of yours you have to wait (potentially for months, potentially years) and have enough know how that you can avoid it getting blown out of the sky because once that ship is gone it is gone for good.

Of course there is the whole player interaction thing, I guess you EVE players are an alright bunch. The EVE economy quite frankly worries me (I always manage to buy things when they cost the most) and sometimes I think some nullsec alliances aren’t capable of running a bath, nevermind a multi-system Empire. I don’t frequent lowsec or nullsec, I’m a highsec PVEer and a WH “whatever-I’m-needed-to-do”-er. But I like it that way. I have an overactive imagination so while you guys slaughter capsuleers I’m busy venting Serpentis battleships and their crew into the deep vastyness of space. I’m pretty sure a lot of those Serp crewmembers needed the money, probably had families, but I’m paid to do it and the pay is decent. I like the way I play and I won’t force you to play the way I like. If I want to PVP I can jump in a different ship and go throw myself onto a low sec gatecamp, if I want to mine (haha yeah right) I can. If I want to manufacture things… I can’t really… If I want to be the capsuleer captain of a battleship who has enough personal wealth to buy continents (1ISK apparently = life changing fortune to those earth bound humies) I am. My point being, the game lets me do whatever I want. I can multiclass!

Some would say I have a problem, an addiction to video games. I would say STFU, I’m a Capsuleer.

N.B. I noticed that this is 899 words long, that’s almost aslong as the last essay I handed in for Ancient History and this has taken an eighth of the time to write.